Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

amazon making the debartolos seem relatable, damn

mh, here in Oregon the hugeass data centers are mostly in Prineville in central Oregon, east of Bend, but Google put theirs up by the Columbia River in The Dalles. They look for cheap land and electricity, small towns that will give them favorable taxes, and from the look of it, they also like them in attractive areas with recreational opportunities, so any employees they transfer in will feel less like they've been transferred to Siberia.

i cannot get over juicero

They have bowed to the inevitable.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/9/1/16243356/juicero-shut-down-lay-off-refund

lol i'd already forgotten about juicero

pouring one out over here

squeezing one out over here

genuinely still don't understand juicero. how is pressing juice out a bag a good thing? why does it need to be net-connected? i know asking these questions is pointless.

if it makes you feel better, investors said the same thing which is what led us here

Juicero was an actual scam beyond the obvious stupidity - in the reporting it seems to get lost that they were trying to portray themselves as a home 'cold press' juice bar. (Those are the fancy ones that grind up vegetables and then press them between two plates at high pressure.) Someone who did manage to make a home cold-press unit would have a pretty innovative and successful new product (at least as much as juicers can be innovative).

At least it seems to me that coverage leans toward "why would you need something to squeeze a juice pouch?!" rather than "this thing promised to squeeze juice from ground up plant matter and couldn't so they substituted juice pouches."

how did it do on squeezing dog shit? I could see this having second legs as a "biological prank machine"

well first you need to get the dog shit into a pouch is your problem

I see dog owners packaging shit into plastic every day. This could be huge

hello, did someone say side hustle?!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQmTZTq7nw

*slips on white New Balance sneakers* now THAT'S what i call a thumb drive

Obviously not using the Juicero, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/04/silicon-valley-ceo-fasting-trend-diet-is-it-safe

'It's not dieting, it's biohacking'

i for one support silicon valley ceos' enthuastic embrace of this, the ultimate disruption: death

death.... is only the beginning

I feel like we might need a separate thread for SV-affiliated accelerationist cults like this Startup Societies Summit bullshit, because this is something really special

http://gizmodo.com/some-crypto-capitalists-just-want-to-see-the-world-burn-1798667463

Thinking back, most of the major factions represented at the Summit contained the expectation of some coming infrastructural apocalypse: monetary institutions, the nation-state, the land itself. And everyone here wanted to speculate early for when it happened, to mete out Judgement Day’s cataclysm unequally and build a privatized new world that, intentionally or not, kept things that way. For the global one percent, tomorrow’s utopia is an economic fallout shelter on the sea where benevolence is measured in consumer demand and little thought is given to the disposable poor indentured to keeping it afloat.

ah yes, so they read Snow Crash as kids and decided the idea of "the raft," the floating island of a bunch of boats stuck together, originally a conglomeration of refugees, would be an ideal for society and not a dystopian nightmare

I just kept thinking of the train in Snowpiercer! If these excruciating dipshits were one third as smart as they think they all are they'd be working on addressing climate change, but no, they need to save themselves from the government first.

obviously governments are less important than mega-corporations and businesses. those will replace the government. also, we will have very fast pizza delivery.

getting flashes of Jennifer Government from all of this in addition to Snow Crash

https://www.fastcompany.com/40466047/two-ex-googlers-want-to-make-bodegas-and-mom-and-pop-corner-stores-obsolete

url makes me angry

it's a dumb idea anyway

Who the fuck wants to buy milk and bread from an automat

feel like part of the long game of automation is removing any jobs where people do multiple things, especially when one of those things is human interaction

what a horrendous scheme. i predict that high-quality, fine-grained data will reveal a spike in the sale of baseball bats, followed by a mysterious spike in brodega robot boxes reporting technical difficulties.

Something additionally obscene in the how they designed their logo after bodega cats, which are a cute social media feature their shitboxes would also destroy.

The idea is easily hated but it's also indicative of late capitalism really having nothing left to cannibalize but itself. And all the ideas people have left appear to be dumb ones wherein a failed concept from many decades ago is revived and promoted as if it now has a chance because smartphones.

Plus the idea that anything deserves a sheen of credibility because the men behind it are "ex-googlers" is pathetic. No offense to any ex-googlers around here.

legendary gypsy-punk band Google Bodega

lol

Who the fuck wants to buy milk and bread from an automat

isn't this how Japan works

tbf automats mainly died in US cities because inflation combined with the failure of dollar coins meant that appropriate prices no longer corresponded well to quantities of loose change people were carrying around. at least that's what i remember from some reading a few years back. IN THEORY there could be some kind of market for a resurgence of automats in the same places they always flourished - dense urban areas, train stations.

but they offered hot food, cooked recently by the staff behind the wall of vending boxes. essentially an alternative to white castles and other early fast-food chains. doing this for random groceries seems at best like a more elaborate version of the vending machine, with a much crappier selection than even the most limited actual bodega. and all the other negatives obviously. lol at the idea that for example, one of these at a gym could sell protein bars! like... um... gyms already sell that stuff dude.

also i've eaten from an automat in amsterdam, was pretty gross but that might just be a disjunct between my idea of good late-night drunk food and that favored by the dutch.

what late-night drunk doesn't love a bunch of slimy pickled fish slathered in some kind of ketchup sauce

with a side of fried gravy orbs

actually maybe they should partner with the soylent people on this. bolus of grey slime, get yer bolus of gray slime here

We share the opinion of everyone in the country

http://www.theroot.com/america-unites-momentarily-to-hate-this-stupid-ass-bod-1806099889

https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corner-store-silicon-valley

Logistics analysis

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/ashamed-to-work-in-silicon-valley-how-techies-became-the-new-bankers

good lord https://t.co/pg1VZdEtE1 pic.twitter.com/iNgoWytag9

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) December 11, 2017

Wait is that dude saying the real GDP is the friends we made along the way

— R. (@rickyslams) December 11, 2017

lol I was like why do I have deja vu reading this and then got to the link

I'm much less enthusiastic about Tim Harford than I was ten years ago but this recent article makes a good point, that it takes a generation to figure out how to optimally apply a new technology, and The Web is maybe halfway there. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694

I can't even begin to formulate a coherent response to this sam altman (y combinator douchebag) run-on sentence of a blog post but I'm going to use this moment to vent

ARGH JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK YOU IDIOT

I'm not linking it, but I am sure someone will, and it is one of the dumbest tone-deaf things I've read

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway?utm_term=.tmyDZ8Lqe#.tcPMrxg1w

ted chiang 👌

I tried to express some of the same sentiments regarding moderation, although not nearly as clearly, on the ilx twitter thread

Ted gets it

Yeah, this is a good essay